People who are counting money REALLY fast

talking about satisfying videos

Maybe you’ve missed this piece of news, but in Sweden we’re on our way to become a cash-free country very soon. A few months ago the first batch of coins and notes was taken out of the market, which caused a cheerful display of people heading to the banks with boxes full of 1 crown coins they had been keeping for years.

The reality is that we don’t use cash here at all. Everything is credit card. It’s pretty comfortable and makes things simpler, but if there’s one thing which I miss, is that we don’t see anyone counting cash anymore. This view has completely disappeared from the land.

Why would I care? I was thinking about it the other day, when I hit the conclusion that seeing people counting cash fast surely can be one of those “satisfying videos”. And in this installment of finding cool niches on Youtube, I wanted to see if anyone has already marked this as a next trend.

After running the first search for “fast money counting”, you understanding that (a) it’s not a trend yet and (b) the fastest manual money counting is happening in Asia. It might be related to the fact they are very good with small hands skills (ping-pong…) or just that the scale at which you need to handle cash is so demanding, that every bank teller has to know how to count fast.

Source: Youtube

The result is that they’ve come up with a few techniques to perform ultra fast money counting, three of which are the dominant ones.

The first one you see above is the “fretting” method – which I guess is probably the easiest to learn, since the hand motion is very natural. Each finger counts a note, so one hand swing is 5. If you practice it a bit, you can count 100 in less than 30 seconds.

Source: Youtube

The ring finger flip is a bit tricky one to master, as it involves micro coordination with the ring finger, which we don’t use that much. This is a Japanese method, used by bankers. It looks more “official”, and reminds the common hand gesture we all use for “dineros, habibi”.

In terms of “watch” satisfaction, both visually and sonically, this one is the top. If you show it to your friends, I guarantee they’ll ask you to do it again and again.

Source: Youtube

And now we get to the real tough one. Here you need to combine micro motorics with both hands, and be very precise with timing. One hand slowly releases the notes, and the other one pinches the stack every 5 or 10. How can you not get confused doing that is beyond my comprehension. I guess the secret to success is to use thick notes, where you can really control the flow using the thumb. So Pound Sterling yes, but USD not so much.

Source: Youtube

And here’s how the world’s fastest counter is doing her drill. Fretting on stacks like a master, she’s counting almost 1000 notes in 1 minute.

And the final verdict – can fast money counting become one of the next Youtuber challenges? I’d say 50/50. It’s not a dead easy to do like most of them, but It could make really fun videos to watch. And again, the sonic element is critical here as well. It’s really cool listening to the sound of the notes flipping. It’s satisfying.

Could be a sub-ASMR niche maybe. This skill is waiting for a pioneer Youtuber who will break it to the west.